Prolific Japanese Auteur Takashi Miike's Gazillionth Feature, First Love, Is Pretty Great

Monica + Leo = True Romance / Well Go USA

FIRST LOVE  / Hatsukoi
(Takashi Miike, 2019, Japan, 108 minutes) 

First Love opens to the strains of fuzzy funk-metal, a boxing match bathed in golden light, and a decapitated head tossed into a neon-lit Tokyo street where it rolls, comes to a stop, rests for a moment, and blinks. Clearly, we're in Takashi Miike Territory, always a good place to be.

Leo (Masataka Kubota, Miike's 13 Assassins), a boxer, is a wiry fellow with floppy hair and a winning style, but his coach laments his lack of drive. When he wins a match, Leo shrugs his shoulders as if to say, "Eh, what-
ever." He never knew his parents, who abandoned him when he was a baby, and this isn't the kind of movie where he'll tearfully reunite with them at the end. When a sports writer asks why he boxes, he says, "It's all I can do."

One day, though, he collapses after a not-especially-hard punch from an opponent. An MRI indicates that he has an inoperable brain tumor. The neurologist informs him that he'll have to give up boxing. He's despondent.

On the run from yakuza and ghost dads / Well Go USA

Only a few blocks away, a young woman named Monica (Sakurako Konishi) isn't having much better luck. In order to pay off her father's debts to the yakuza, she spends her days locked in an apartment and her nights selling her favors to clients. It's driving her so batty she keeps imagining she's being followed by a bespectacled, tighty-whitey-sporting middle-aged man draped in a sheet like a cross between the wriggling figure in Miike's Audition and Casey Affleck's mopey husband in David Lowery's Ghost Story. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that Sheet Man is the ghost of Monica's fucked-up father. 

The fateful encounter that brings these Gun Crazy-like loners together involves the ghost dad and the corrupt cop, Otomo (Kōji Yakusho lookalike Nao Ohmori, Miike's Ichi the Killer), assigned to keep an eye on Monica. Soon, the two are on the run from the granite-faced mob boss and his minions, including crazed gangster's moll Julie (Becky) and Kase (Shôta Sometani), an excitable goon who keeps killing everyone he meets--good, bad, neutral--it doesn't matter. He can't help himself, and some of his kills are especially amusing. That wouldn't be the case if Miike was going for realism, but there's a stylized, graphic-novel quality to this twilight world.

Once Kase enters the scene, it becomes clear that First Love is Miike in fun mode. There are car chases, fiery explosions, unintentional blow jobs (I'm not about to explain what that means), and mayhem involving cars, guns, knives, samurai swords, and squealing, sax-driven jazz from composer Endo Koji. Just when you think it can't get any more gonzo, lightning bolts spring from Leo's head, and he drives into a Yellow Submarine-meets-Scooby-Doo animated sequence in which sound effects are spelled out in big, block letters: "CRASH! VROOM!" (This bit was too short for my taste.)

Kase is the cutie second from the right / Well Go USA

Viewers scarred by Miike's more extreme entries may breathe a sigh of relief. It's not so much that he's never made a film as zippy as this one, but that his more outrageous fare tends to attract more attention.

First Love isn't as sweet as his zombie musical The Happiness of the Katakuris, which is suffused with pastoral beauty and familial affection, but it's still pretty sweet--and with no sticky aftertaste. Granted, anyone expecting the abused, drug-addicted Monica to turn avenging angel may leave disappointed, but it isn't as if there aren't women in the film, like Julie, who can handle a weapon, it's just that she isn't one of them.

If anything, I would have liked to spend more time with her and Leo, even if I found the considerably less stable supporting characters more entertaining. The obvious solution: a sequel. Considering that 59-year-old Miike has churned out two to three features a year for almost 30 years, including two sequels to Dead or Alive--and I'm not even counting the 41 made-for-video, anthology, and TV projects--I wouldn't be surprised if we get one.



First Love opens at the Egyptian on Oct 4. Click here for more information.